Posts

I’ve been a lifelong consumer of music and I love pretty much all genres. Music really hits me emotionally. I love live music, blessed with the Isle of Wight Festival and the local music scene here, and visited many orchestras and music venues over the years. Despite this, as a kid, I never really explored music. I just consumed it. I had a school borrowed acoustic guitar for a few weeks but that was it. Then something prompted an impulse purchase of a guitar for myself when I was 25. I was a typical noob but did eventually get weekly lessons with local guitarist Matt Kellett. ...

Unit Testing Newbie When I first started taking unit testing more seriously (it was 13+ years ago, don’t fight me!) I didn’t understand how to test something when I was using DateTime.UtcNow. My tests worked then failed a while later. I asked, on reflection, an embarrassing question on Stack Overflow. What made it embarrassing was that it showed my lack of understanding of non-deterministic values and testing code that used them. As I mentioned in this case it was usage of DateTime in C#. ...

Squishing Everything Back to a Single Commit in Git Ever wanted your Git history to go back to the initial commit while preserving the content you have today? For example, maybe you’re making a private repository public and want to remove the commit history but keep the current state. While a better option might be to create a new repository and commit everything fresh, if you really need to do this, here are the steps I took recently. ...

This post was taken from a rough gist I created whilst strategising a GitFlow branching strategy in a new team setting. Views may have likely changed since then and no on-size fits all. Introduction However you and your team manages branches; it’s important to have at least some kind of strategy that everyone adheres to. Rules and process should be designed to keep things consistent within the team and changes flowing to avoid complex merges and other such issues with multiple work steams on a single code repository. ...

This post was taken from a rough gist I created whilst battling bundling and minification back in Nov ‘23. Things have likely changed since then. What is it? Bundling and minification are optimisation techniques used to improve the performance of web applications. Mainly by reducing the number of HTTP requests and decreasing the overall payload transmitted over the wite. We would typically do this for as many of our site-wide CSS and JavaScript files. ...